![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – 3. Fraying
Title: Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – 3. Fraying
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index
There's no more news of the mystery man as Neal drinks his coffee, and when he finishes and buses his own table – always a gentleman – and walks out onto the streets again, he's turned over half a dozen possibilities and a baker's dozen responses to those, and he can't act on any of them until he knows which one it is. So: time to involve Mozzie, if it's time to do anything.
It's probably his imagination, but odd looks come his way on the streets. A sidelong glance here, an averted gaze there: people he's passed day by day who no longer have the curious wariness of locals regarding a wealthy newcomer but the edgy evaluation of those waiting for a storm to break.
Probably his imagination. That's what he tells himself, though he's not so foolish as to actually believe it.
He's careful not to hurry his steps. Not to look suspicious, not to let it slip that his own gut reaction is turning unfriendly. No one recognizes you in New York. It's assumed anonymity: no one can possibly know everyone, so if you see someone strange who isn't obviously a tourist, you just assume they've been there forever.
Here, apparently, not so much.
Here, if he gives himself a reason to be noticed, he'll be noticed, remembered, and known.
And here he'd thought Mozzie had selected for a friendly population.
He crosses back from the main road, cuts through the fruit market, and starts on the way up the hill. Past the little shops that begin to fade into little homes, which grow steadily larger and farther-spaced as the road twines up toward his mansion. Here, opulence is space: wide yards, rambling houses. Set aside. No spots of prestige in the middle of the bustle, no high-perched penthouses with million-dollar views.
New York is a long way away, but he never thought he could stay there forever.
His mind almost makes it back to the city – he almost makes it back to the private road that'll lead him to this iteration of home – when he turns a corner and sees his face on a lamppost, black and white and red all over, smiling in a self-satisfied way with a caption that reads, REWARD.
Two hours into searching for Kate, Neal runs into the same problem that's always accompanied searching for Kate: she's damn good at disappearing, and he can't just put up posters like he's looking for a lost dog.
Which leaves him casing the exits, the cabbies and the marinas and the airport, wondering who the hell he's supposed to ask and who the people are who sent Kate running in the first place. And maybe that should be obvious, but it isn't. Not to him, anyway.
Peter had been telling him that he couldn't think clearly, where Kate was involved. Neal hadn't listened.
Around the airport it's all white concrete turned gray by the night's rain, overcast clouds feeling hungover and slow, fliers for local attractions clinging limp to lampposts. Neal walks up to the entrance feeling cradled in the palm of the early morning, where the sky anticipates sun and the clouds stand ready to hold it at bay.
There's a man at the information kiosk, all photo-perfect to greet the tourists as they come in from whatever timezones they left at home. A three-piece suit and a million-dollar grin, chiseled features, bright blue eyes, and a look like the cat who got the cream. Neal stops up short. He seems awfully familiar.
A quick glance around the entrance says that Kate's not there; it's all couches and ticket counters and the security gate leading to the concourse. So Neal goes up to the kiosk. "I'm looking for a friend," he says.
Up close, the man who stands there isn't quite all photo-perfect: it's early, yet, and he looks like he's been up all night. There's a haggard edge under the smile, and the smile looks like he put it on with the uniform.
But his tone is perfectly pleasant, in a way that raises the hairs on the back of Neal's neck. "Of course," the man says. "Arriving or departing?"
"Departing." It's a shot in the dark anyway, but if there is a right answer, that's it. "She was on the flight to..."
He lets that trail off; snaps his fingers a few times, like he's trying to remember. "New York?" the man prompts him – helpful, as expected. "It's the only flight leaving in the next few hours."
Neal almost forgets to act like that's jogged his memory.
Of course. It makes sense, in a way; New York is the center around which his life revolves. Seems like it, anyway. But Kate said, We should already be running, and if you're running, why run straight back to the lions' teeth?
"That would be the one," he says, with a light tone and a grin, but he doesn't stick the landing. He can hear it in his own voice. "I was wondering if you could tell me if she's gone through to the concourse already."
If that's true, is the question. If she's here, if she's going back, if that's the trail. It makes too much sense, and too little.
But either way, the man gives an apologetic shrug. "Sorry. I don't have any access to that information. I could have her paged back to the security gate, if it's important."
Part of him wants to say Yes, it is. The other part knows that having someone call out her name over a PA is a good way to draw too much or the wrong kinds of attention. So he says "Thanks, but it's not that important. I just didn't want to miss seeing her off."
The man makes a sympathetic noise, or one he's angled to sound sympathetic. "It's always a shame to miss those connections," he says, and Neal has to fight the feeling that he's being mocked. "Is there anything else I can help you with?"
If the man was likely to be allowed past the security gates, Neal would have found a way to lift his ID. As it is, there's no point. "No, thank you," he says, and turns away. Time for a new plan.
Kate was the one making all the plans, from the beginning.
Of course she was. Kate is smart; she's quick, she's clever, and in his private moments, Neal thinks she's stronger than he'll ever be. He had a life of breaking the rules – small ones, larger ones, anything to get him through and then anything to get him away – and she had a job at an investment fund that she picked up out of college and she was thrown into a con artist's life and she flew. Maybe not perfectly or happily, especially not at first, but she flew. And she's flying now.
Literally, probably, soon.
He's paused on a corner to catch his breath – more metaphorical than literal; he's in shape, ran every day in prison – when the payphone rings. If his life were a spy thriller, one of the ones Mozzie takes as unvarnished truth, he'd attribute some meaning to that.
Instead, he lets it ring and thinks through his options. Staying in New York is an idiot's bet, but it's not like he's been left with much choice.
Neal's pretty sure he's lost the silver car, but not so sure that heading back to the Bon Bean is wise. Calling Torrino's men and admitting he's being followed, though, is a good way to get them backing off, and he's not about to stand them up without an explanation, so he starts thinking of ways to circle back around.
He's just headed down a cross-street when the payphone he walks past rings.
He turns to eye it, then glances up and down the street. A few turned heads, no real interest that he can see; he picks up the receiver, gives it a once-over, and puts it to his ear. "Hello?"
"Well, it took you long enough," snips a voice on the other end, and even the interference on the old payphone line isn't enough to stop the shock it carries. "When you worked for me you'd always pick up on the second ring."
Neal cases the street again, pressing closer to the payphone on instinct. Get ready to take cover. Don't let anyone hear. "Mr. Adler," he said, pitching his voice light and friendly. "I didn't expect to be hearing from you. Ever again."
"And I thought prison might keep you occupied a little longer," Adler says. "I suppose we both underestimated each other."
"Sounds like it," Neal agrees. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"You're a smart man, Neal, so let's not beat around the bush," Adler says. "I have business here; you and Kate are going to try to thwart me. I'm not interested in letting that happen. If you come to me now, we can make a deal."
Something cold goes through Neal, because he's known for a long time now that Adler's a bit sharper, a bit more ruthless, than anyone gives him credit for. He drops the act. "Dammit, where is she?"
"I don't think she's really your concern at the moment." Adler's voice is flippant, but still hard-edged. "So long as you're a threat to me, I promise you that I will burn you out of every last option, every last place you think to hide, until there is nothing left but a pile of ash and charcoal."
"I'm going to find you," Neal promises. "I'm going to find Kate–"
"Good!" Adler almost chirps the word. "Let's talk face to face. You know how to find me, Neal. I'm not hiding from you."
Neal throws the receiver back onto its cradle before he realizes that he has no idea what Adler means.
For a moment, Neal thinks he's picking through wreckage. Then the world snaps into focus – focus of a sort, at least – and it looks less like wreckage and more like a back alley, a few wooden pallets here, some trash there, the rain insufficient to wash away the general grime and the smell of the city. He looks at his hands, which are wrinkling at the fingertips in the humidity; he looks at his clothes, which are soaked-through and somewhat out of order.
There's enough adrenaline in him to make him think he's been in a fight; a con or a heist wouldn't leave him looking like this. There's something else, too, but he can't grasp it.
Peter should be here, but he's misplaced Peter. Misplaced the FBI. On purpose or not, he can't tell.
It's all right, though.
It's not the first time he's been on the run.
He crouches down, his muscles and head and chest all protesting, and checks his ankle; no anklet, but the skin burns as his fingers brush the fabric over it. Enough to make him swear, but quietly, into the ambient noise of the rain.
Come on. Think. What does this mean?
He knows he's not firing on all cylinders – his mind is slow, clanking around inside his skull like it's navigating wreckage of its own. Thinks he has to find a phone, or get away from a phone; he was talking to someone, trying to meet someone, trying to find someone, trying not to be found.
All his thinking is contradicting itself.
He stands, and a rush of vertigo makes him put his hand out to the wall. A fragment of memory slices through his mind, hard and hot as a bullet, and without thinking he's pulling back, making his way down toward the far alley mouth. It takes him far too long to get there – a nondescript road (and come on, think, it's never nondescript, but his mind can't mark out what's significant and what's not, whether it's the distant blaze of halogen streetlights or the four-car width of the street or the oil-black pavement sparking with raindrops or the long windowless buildings that glower, flat and squat, like they're hunched down and waiting for a blow), dotted with trucks and the occasional car, devoid of human motion.
And part of his brain says Run, you idiot, put as much distance as possible between yourself and this mess, and part of it says You coward, you're just going to leave your partner behind? You're supposed to be in this together. Go back. Now.
We have to run, she'd said.
One of the cars is a car-length away and he moves toward it just far enough to catch a glimpse of eyes and anger. Sprints two meters back and ducks back into the alley on instinct, presses his back against the wall, holds his breath, listens for the creak of a car door, for footsteps.
There's nothing. And there was something wrong with the eyes he caught, the angle at which he caught them.
With his heart knocking in his ears Neal creeps back to the alley lip, and glances out. There's no motion but the falling rain, and as he edges back onto the sidewalk he makes eye contact with the person in the mirror of the car's surface, and breaks it just as quickly.
It's him. It's him.
Red-eyed and bedraggled, hair peppered with debris and plastered down by rain, stubble and the harsh, distant light giving him a gaunt look that only plays up the expression of a hunted animal. What he read as anger would probably be better called desperation. He has to force himself to turn back to the reflection, because he can't shake the feeling that his mirror image is threatened, ready to strike out, attack.
Nice metaphor for the problem at hand, he thinks, disconnectedly.
Neal can't trust himself. He looks down, sees his hands shaking, and edges back into the relative safety of the alley; he's got no idea how he got here or where he was heading, doesn't know what he's been doing or what he's avoiding, and he looks like a junkie looking for a hit. He doesn't know if he's undercover or running or in trouble. All he knows is that he's off anklet, and he can't quite make a space for anklet in his mind, like maybe that's all been a dream, a delusion, and he's waking up into the rain and if he approached anyone about it he'd be told that's ridiculous, what, do you think your life's a fairytale? Friends in high places? Someone like you?
Got to be able to trust your friends. Where's that trust for you now?
Mozzie's drilled it into him, again and again, that the worst place to be is frozen. If you're frozen, if you're paralyzed by choice, then the rest of the world moves without waiting for you, and the rest of the world won't be kind to you. Windows close. Nooses tighten. Wolves close in.
There's a reason people leave out freeze from fight, flight or freeze.
It's a lesson Neal feels like he's learned the hard way.
How, when, and why is the question he's left with, and he's afraid the answers are Just like this, right now, for the usual reasons. Maybe he should hotwire the car and make for Canada, but he feels like in his current state he'd drive it into the river and drown. His hands are shaking.
Besides, he has the niggling feeling there's something he needs to take care of, here.
"Don't suppose you'd know what that is," he asks his reflection, sotto voce. Then, like a bottle breaking, he finds himself laughing; desperate, side-splitting, throat-tearing laughter, pounding out like spilled wine or arterial blood, and there is nothing, nothing at all, that he can grasp onto that strikes him as funny.
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index
(iii)
There's no more news of the mystery man as Neal drinks his coffee, and when he finishes and buses his own table – always a gentleman – and walks out onto the streets again, he's turned over half a dozen possibilities and a baker's dozen responses to those, and he can't act on any of them until he knows which one it is. So: time to involve Mozzie, if it's time to do anything.
It's probably his imagination, but odd looks come his way on the streets. A sidelong glance here, an averted gaze there: people he's passed day by day who no longer have the curious wariness of locals regarding a wealthy newcomer but the edgy evaluation of those waiting for a storm to break.
Probably his imagination. That's what he tells himself, though he's not so foolish as to actually believe it.
He's careful not to hurry his steps. Not to look suspicious, not to let it slip that his own gut reaction is turning unfriendly. No one recognizes you in New York. It's assumed anonymity: no one can possibly know everyone, so if you see someone strange who isn't obviously a tourist, you just assume they've been there forever.
Here, apparently, not so much.
Here, if he gives himself a reason to be noticed, he'll be noticed, remembered, and known.
And here he'd thought Mozzie had selected for a friendly population.
He crosses back from the main road, cuts through the fruit market, and starts on the way up the hill. Past the little shops that begin to fade into little homes, which grow steadily larger and farther-spaced as the road twines up toward his mansion. Here, opulence is space: wide yards, rambling houses. Set aside. No spots of prestige in the middle of the bustle, no high-perched penthouses with million-dollar views.
New York is a long way away, but he never thought he could stay there forever.
His mind almost makes it back to the city – he almost makes it back to the private road that'll lead him to this iteration of home – when he turns a corner and sees his face on a lamppost, black and white and red all over, smiling in a self-satisfied way with a caption that reads, REWARD.
(ii)
Two hours into searching for Kate, Neal runs into the same problem that's always accompanied searching for Kate: she's damn good at disappearing, and he can't just put up posters like he's looking for a lost dog.
Which leaves him casing the exits, the cabbies and the marinas and the airport, wondering who the hell he's supposed to ask and who the people are who sent Kate running in the first place. And maybe that should be obvious, but it isn't. Not to him, anyway.
Peter had been telling him that he couldn't think clearly, where Kate was involved. Neal hadn't listened.
Around the airport it's all white concrete turned gray by the night's rain, overcast clouds feeling hungover and slow, fliers for local attractions clinging limp to lampposts. Neal walks up to the entrance feeling cradled in the palm of the early morning, where the sky anticipates sun and the clouds stand ready to hold it at bay.
There's a man at the information kiosk, all photo-perfect to greet the tourists as they come in from whatever timezones they left at home. A three-piece suit and a million-dollar grin, chiseled features, bright blue eyes, and a look like the cat who got the cream. Neal stops up short. He seems awfully familiar.
A quick glance around the entrance says that Kate's not there; it's all couches and ticket counters and the security gate leading to the concourse. So Neal goes up to the kiosk. "I'm looking for a friend," he says.
Up close, the man who stands there isn't quite all photo-perfect: it's early, yet, and he looks like he's been up all night. There's a haggard edge under the smile, and the smile looks like he put it on with the uniform.
But his tone is perfectly pleasant, in a way that raises the hairs on the back of Neal's neck. "Of course," the man says. "Arriving or departing?"
"Departing." It's a shot in the dark anyway, but if there is a right answer, that's it. "She was on the flight to..."
He lets that trail off; snaps his fingers a few times, like he's trying to remember. "New York?" the man prompts him – helpful, as expected. "It's the only flight leaving in the next few hours."
Neal almost forgets to act like that's jogged his memory.
Of course. It makes sense, in a way; New York is the center around which his life revolves. Seems like it, anyway. But Kate said, We should already be running, and if you're running, why run straight back to the lions' teeth?
"That would be the one," he says, with a light tone and a grin, but he doesn't stick the landing. He can hear it in his own voice. "I was wondering if you could tell me if she's gone through to the concourse already."
If that's true, is the question. If she's here, if she's going back, if that's the trail. It makes too much sense, and too little.
But either way, the man gives an apologetic shrug. "Sorry. I don't have any access to that information. I could have her paged back to the security gate, if it's important."
Part of him wants to say Yes, it is. The other part knows that having someone call out her name over a PA is a good way to draw too much or the wrong kinds of attention. So he says "Thanks, but it's not that important. I just didn't want to miss seeing her off."
The man makes a sympathetic noise, or one he's angled to sound sympathetic. "It's always a shame to miss those connections," he says, and Neal has to fight the feeling that he's being mocked. "Is there anything else I can help you with?"
If the man was likely to be allowed past the security gates, Neal would have found a way to lift his ID. As it is, there's no point. "No, thank you," he says, and turns away. Time for a new plan.
Kate was the one making all the plans, from the beginning.
Of course she was. Kate is smart; she's quick, she's clever, and in his private moments, Neal thinks she's stronger than he'll ever be. He had a life of breaking the rules – small ones, larger ones, anything to get him through and then anything to get him away – and she had a job at an investment fund that she picked up out of college and she was thrown into a con artist's life and she flew. Maybe not perfectly or happily, especially not at first, but she flew. And she's flying now.
Literally, probably, soon.
(i)
He's paused on a corner to catch his breath – more metaphorical than literal; he's in shape, ran every day in prison – when the payphone rings. If his life were a spy thriller, one of the ones Mozzie takes as unvarnished truth, he'd attribute some meaning to that.
Instead, he lets it ring and thinks through his options. Staying in New York is an idiot's bet, but it's not like he's been left with much choice.
Neal's pretty sure he's lost the silver car, but not so sure that heading back to the Bon Bean is wise. Calling Torrino's men and admitting he's being followed, though, is a good way to get them backing off, and he's not about to stand them up without an explanation, so he starts thinking of ways to circle back around.
He's just headed down a cross-street when the payphone he walks past rings.
He turns to eye it, then glances up and down the street. A few turned heads, no real interest that he can see; he picks up the receiver, gives it a once-over, and puts it to his ear. "Hello?"
"Well, it took you long enough," snips a voice on the other end, and even the interference on the old payphone line isn't enough to stop the shock it carries. "When you worked for me you'd always pick up on the second ring."
Neal cases the street again, pressing closer to the payphone on instinct. Get ready to take cover. Don't let anyone hear. "Mr. Adler," he said, pitching his voice light and friendly. "I didn't expect to be hearing from you. Ever again."
"And I thought prison might keep you occupied a little longer," Adler says. "I suppose we both underestimated each other."
"Sounds like it," Neal agrees. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"You're a smart man, Neal, so let's not beat around the bush," Adler says. "I have business here; you and Kate are going to try to thwart me. I'm not interested in letting that happen. If you come to me now, we can make a deal."
Something cold goes through Neal, because he's known for a long time now that Adler's a bit sharper, a bit more ruthless, than anyone gives him credit for. He drops the act. "Dammit, where is she?"
"I don't think she's really your concern at the moment." Adler's voice is flippant, but still hard-edged. "So long as you're a threat to me, I promise you that I will burn you out of every last option, every last place you think to hide, until there is nothing left but a pile of ash and charcoal."
"I'm going to find you," Neal promises. "I'm going to find Kate–"
"Good!" Adler almost chirps the word. "Let's talk face to face. You know how to find me, Neal. I'm not hiding from you."
Neal throws the receiver back onto its cradle before he realizes that he has no idea what Adler means.
( )
For a moment, Neal thinks he's picking through wreckage. Then the world snaps into focus – focus of a sort, at least – and it looks less like wreckage and more like a back alley, a few wooden pallets here, some trash there, the rain insufficient to wash away the general grime and the smell of the city. He looks at his hands, which are wrinkling at the fingertips in the humidity; he looks at his clothes, which are soaked-through and somewhat out of order.
There's enough adrenaline in him to make him think he's been in a fight; a con or a heist wouldn't leave him looking like this. There's something else, too, but he can't grasp it.
Peter should be here, but he's misplaced Peter. Misplaced the FBI. On purpose or not, he can't tell.
It's all right, though.
It's not the first time he's been on the run.
He crouches down, his muscles and head and chest all protesting, and checks his ankle; no anklet, but the skin burns as his fingers brush the fabric over it. Enough to make him swear, but quietly, into the ambient noise of the rain.
Come on. Think. What does this mean?
He knows he's not firing on all cylinders – his mind is slow, clanking around inside his skull like it's navigating wreckage of its own. Thinks he has to find a phone, or get away from a phone; he was talking to someone, trying to meet someone, trying to find someone, trying not to be found.
All his thinking is contradicting itself.
He stands, and a rush of vertigo makes him put his hand out to the wall. A fragment of memory slices through his mind, hard and hot as a bullet, and without thinking he's pulling back, making his way down toward the far alley mouth. It takes him far too long to get there – a nondescript road (and come on, think, it's never nondescript, but his mind can't mark out what's significant and what's not, whether it's the distant blaze of halogen streetlights or the four-car width of the street or the oil-black pavement sparking with raindrops or the long windowless buildings that glower, flat and squat, like they're hunched down and waiting for a blow), dotted with trucks and the occasional car, devoid of human motion.
And part of his brain says Run, you idiot, put as much distance as possible between yourself and this mess, and part of it says You coward, you're just going to leave your partner behind? You're supposed to be in this together. Go back. Now.
We have to run, she'd said.
One of the cars is a car-length away and he moves toward it just far enough to catch a glimpse of eyes and anger. Sprints two meters back and ducks back into the alley on instinct, presses his back against the wall, holds his breath, listens for the creak of a car door, for footsteps.
There's nothing. And there was something wrong with the eyes he caught, the angle at which he caught them.
With his heart knocking in his ears Neal creeps back to the alley lip, and glances out. There's no motion but the falling rain, and as he edges back onto the sidewalk he makes eye contact with the person in the mirror of the car's surface, and breaks it just as quickly.
It's him. It's him.
Red-eyed and bedraggled, hair peppered with debris and plastered down by rain, stubble and the harsh, distant light giving him a gaunt look that only plays up the expression of a hunted animal. What he read as anger would probably be better called desperation. He has to force himself to turn back to the reflection, because he can't shake the feeling that his mirror image is threatened, ready to strike out, attack.
Nice metaphor for the problem at hand, he thinks, disconnectedly.
Neal can't trust himself. He looks down, sees his hands shaking, and edges back into the relative safety of the alley; he's got no idea how he got here or where he was heading, doesn't know what he's been doing or what he's avoiding, and he looks like a junkie looking for a hit. He doesn't know if he's undercover or running or in trouble. All he knows is that he's off anklet, and he can't quite make a space for anklet in his mind, like maybe that's all been a dream, a delusion, and he's waking up into the rain and if he approached anyone about it he'd be told that's ridiculous, what, do you think your life's a fairytale? Friends in high places? Someone like you?
Got to be able to trust your friends. Where's that trust for you now?
Mozzie's drilled it into him, again and again, that the worst place to be is frozen. If you're frozen, if you're paralyzed by choice, then the rest of the world moves without waiting for you, and the rest of the world won't be kind to you. Windows close. Nooses tighten. Wolves close in.
There's a reason people leave out freeze from fight, flight or freeze.
It's a lesson Neal feels like he's learned the hard way.
How, when, and why is the question he's left with, and he's afraid the answers are Just like this, right now, for the usual reasons. Maybe he should hotwire the car and make for Canada, but he feels like in his current state he'd drive it into the river and drown. His hands are shaking.
Besides, he has the niggling feeling there's something he needs to take care of, here.
"Don't suppose you'd know what that is," he asks his reflection, sotto voce. Then, like a bottle breaking, he finds himself laughing; desperate, side-splitting, throat-tearing laughter, pounding out like spilled wine or arterial blood, and there is nothing, nothing at all, that he can grasp onto that strikes him as funny.